Ostasien Aktuell Rice Terrace Landscapes and Their Traditional Cultivation as Resources for Regional and Local Development?

Insights into socio-cultural and economic transformations of the Hani Rice Terraces in Yunnan Province
Extensive rice terraces were among the earliest East and Southeast Asian properties acknowledged by UNESCO as representative cultural landscapes to be inscribed on the World Heritage list. In China’s Yunnan Province, strong development agendas on different administrative scales (national, regional, local) constantly challenge the conservation of one such World Heritage landscape, the Hani Rice Terraces, inscribed in 2013. Demographic changes and out-migration that result from a low economic return and laborious maintenance further threaten a continuation of terrace cultivation by younger generations. However, such structural problems remain invisible in romanticised depictions of terraced paddy fields used for promotion of cultural tourism. Through the critical lens of a ‘Politics of Scale’, this talk aims to illustrate how local heritage ‘assets’ are harnessed by public and private actors who pursue their own scalar strategies in the course of World Heritage inscription. Cultural tourism-oriented development further exposes local heritage including related traditional knowledge to an increasing commercialisation.